I wrote the engine for this website as my graduation work in Engineering here in Italy.
The underlying engine is able to do much more than exposed. It can accept votes for almost everything
you can see on it. Even votes can be voted!
Users can be voted, everything can be voted. A vote is an extension for a comment. This website is
able to accept votes and comments linked together. This way, not only there is a listing of opinions,
comments and points of view, but there is even a short way to know what people think about something
(its average vote :-)).
The engine for this website uses a relational structure with trigger-based cache handling. Cascading
rules allow easy maintenance. VIEWs and complex JOINs, made possible by the underlying RDBMS, bring
power to the user interface, allowing powerful data mining while keeping low CPU usage.
This engine is being tested on a low-cost webserver, in order to better find its limits. Currently,
in spite of the high number of hits, it's running smoothly and seems to be able to scale well.
I plan, in the future, to release the engine for this website to the OpenSource community, but I
prefer, first, to reach a good stability and performance level.

Hard to say something new on this Linux distribution. My experience on Linux basically grew "with RH.
Very easy, for me, to install and administer. Choose whichever distribution you like, but choose Linux
as your webserver as it's reliable, fast, has got low system requirements and is, basically, free :-)

Apache

The premier webserver nowadays (according to the Netcraft
Web Server Survey). Fast, reliable, worldwide available and well known, fully configurable and
much more. What can I say? It's not been that difficult to choose this webserver and I'm happy with it :-)

PHP

PHP (recursive acronym for 'PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor') is a widely-used Open Source general-purpose
scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. The best
things in using PHP are that it is extremely simple for a newcomer, but offers many advanced features
for a professional programmer. Don't be afraid reading the long list of PHP's features. You can jump in,
in a short time, and start writing simple scripts in a few hours.

FireBird

This has been a harder choice to make. FireBird is the OpenSource result of the fork from
InterBase when (August 2000)
Borland made its sources available for free.
Since then, FireBird has reached release 1.xx. According to my personal experience, FireBird is pretty
fast, requires a low memory footprint, has single file databases and a powerful relational structure with
a versioning engine. It's extremely easy to install, is available on almost every platform, can perform
online backups, has got triggers, relations, events, stored procedures, UDFs, ANSI-SQL92 compliance and
much more. Personally, I do like it because it can easily integrate with high level languages and, thanks
to its versioning engine, it can recover and restart in a matter of seconds (or even less :-)).